


Oblivion

by jugheadjones



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: 49 percent of surgeons listen to rock n roll in the operating room, Afterlife, Andrews family, Baseball, Death, Depression, Divorce, Family, Family Feels, M/M, Miscarriage, Multi, Nostalgia, Parent Death, Pregnancy, Rock and Roll, Siblings, Springsteen, Suburbia, boyhood summers, happy birthday bruce, i think it might become a seminal fred work for me at least, it starts off uninteresting but it'll get there i promise, parentdale, spirituality, this started out as a one shot but quickly became a multi chapter, young alice, young fred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-23
Updated: 2017-10-03
Packaged: 2019-01-04 09:26:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 14,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12166143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jugheadjones/pseuds/jugheadjones
Summary: Chronologically, a list of all the times Fred Andrews has experienced God.Or, Archie's friend Reggie asks him what it's like to die and Fred tells him heaven is front row tickets at a Bruce Springsteen concert where he never stops playing.





	1. First Inning

**Author's Note:**

> happy birthday bruce springsteen!!! (sept 23)

Fred Andrews is seven years old the first time he sees God.

He’s standing at first base, one foot planted firmly on the bag, the other a foot or or so apart in the dirt, waiting impatiently for Ally Cooper to just pitch the damn ball so Jerry can hit it already. He’s pretty sure he’s got a run in him, and there’s a good hour before his mom’s going to be out calling him for dinner. They can probably get to a sixth or seventh inning at least if she’d just throw the goshdang thing sometime in the next century.

He watches Alice as she blows on the ball, then squats a bit like a duck and squints out toward home, sticking the arm holding the ball behind her back and rotating her grip. She straightens up, shifts position. Spits. Struts around the mound and smacks the ball into her glove.

 _Throw the puppyshit ball, Alice_ , thinks Fred and shifts his weight from the foot on the bag back to the foot in the gravel. _Puppyshit_ is his and Alice's worst swear - or his, at least, because Alice is the queen of bad words and likely has worse than that lurking in her never exhausted arsenal. Alice is the only person he's ever heard use Shit, and he thinks she'd even say the big Eff word given the chance. He has a kind of awed respect for her in this capacity. Even his older sisters don't curse like Alice, even Linny, the most uncouth among them, and a whole thirteen years old and prime cursing age, doesn't swear like a grown man. Alice does. Fred's mom says she learns it from her dad.

Alice does the windup, but even that takes forever- she stands on one leg for a long while, looking down over home plate, her one skinny white leg as steady and unwavering as a post. Fred feels like a water balloon about to burst. If Al doesn't throw this soon he's going to explode. Every nerve in his body is primed and ready to run: he keeps inhaling dusty mouthfuls of hot August air in nervous anticipation, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Every so often he slaps absently at the insects buzzing around his sweaty forehead, but refuses to break concentration.

His eyes are on home plate. That’s where he’s going.

Jerry Mason is eight years old that year, 79 pounds, and already taller than everyone in his second grade class. Already this season he’s seen Fred’s baseball team through two balls, three wooden bats, and the windshield of a Ford six blocks away from the ball field. Jerry’s bat connects with Ally’s fastball with the force of a small locomotive plowing into a mountainside, splitting the air with the nicest, most resounding crack Fred’s ever heard.

Fred takes off running, too focused on home plate to realize that the ball is shooting straight down the diamond toward him.

He’s halfway to second when the ball connects hard with his skull and splits the air with the second-loudest crack of the evening.

He has enough time to think _crap_ , and see second base fall gleefully backward out of his field of vision, as nauseatingly quickly as the tilt-a-whirl at the fair.

And then his body hits the diamond and he’s out, in every sense of the word.

* * *

Everything is black, but he feels an odd swelling around him, a surging up like an ocean in a storm and a loud, amplified hum pressing hard against his ears. With this hum comes a whiteness, fading in through the black and obscuring the dark around him, growing brighter and brighter until it hurts his eyes - he tries to shut them against the light but finds them already closed, and when he tries to raise a hand he finds his body does not obey him.

The white flickers and cools just when he thinks he can’t bear it anymore, becoming less like sunlight and more like a fog. Only it didn’t have the texture or density of fog, it wasn’t a solid thing: it seemed more than simply the whole world was white, that the whiteness was all of it.

He isn’t scared yet, rather, he feels an odd sense of calm. He becomes suddenly aware that it’s not the sharp gravel of the baseball diamond below him but a carpet of soft, cool grass. For a long while he lays and only enjoys the feel of the grass under him, a slight breeze brushing the hot skin of his forehead. Fred breathes in for a long moment and feels not the grit and cloying heat of the summer afternoon he’d left, but a cool mouthful of fresh air, and the faint scent of clover.

Faintly he can hear music, and something else - a sound he recognizes but can’t quite put a name to. He lays in the soft grass in this white world, listening to the far-away music, thinking very calmly of nothing at all. He does not know where he is, or how he got here from the baseball diamond, but this absence of knowledge does not bother him. Nor does the shadowy figure striding toward him out of the whiteness bother him: he accepts such things in his current state as a matter of course.

“Are you alright, Freddie?”

It looks like his father, but it’s not his father - of this, Fred is quite certain. Something about the way the figure glimmers around the edges, the way the features of its face keep shifting when he looks at it too long, so that he realizes the person looks only like a suggestion of his father, and that his mind is only filling in the gaps. The voice is familiar, but imperfect: more like Mr. Weatherbee than his dad, he thinks. Close, but no cigar.

“Who are you?” he manages, in a voice that is somehow quite clear and strong for someone who’s just been blasted in the head by a crackerjack of a hit. His father - or the thing that looks like him - only smiles and raises an index finger to the sky. He can’t see the sky, but he knows it must be there somewhere out in the whiteness, because that’s grass under his hands and he can feel a breeze.

“God, then.” says Fred, figuring he knows what the upward gesture’s supposed to mean. He pushes himself up on his elbows without much effort. “But why are you here?”

In another seven years, FP Jones, whom he hasn’t met yet, is going to tell him that God, if there is one, looks like Billy Idol. Another few summers and he might have seen one of his own idols: a luminous, formidable Springsteen with a white guitar. But Fred is seven right now, and the only man he worships is his dad.

His dad - or the thing that passes as his dad - says nothing. Fred listens hard to the music in the distance. In the place he would have called the Real World, the three fastest runners on the team - Ally Cooper among them - have been dispatched to make the sprint back to his neighbourhood and alert his parents that their son was lying stone-cold knocked out in the field. Their russet-haired centre fielder, Manny Muggs, has just taken his pulse at the wrist and found it dangerously weak. Fred knows none of this, and feels none of this happen.

"Just rest." murmurs the thing that passes for God simply, and smoothes a gentle hand through his hair. Until now, Fred had been convinced that it couldn't touch him, and is pleasantly surprised by the touch on his forehead. It tingles slightly, like toothpaste on a bug bite.

Rest is something he can do. He shuts his eyes, but the white remains as constant as ever. He figures he’ll be forever changed after this, like the people on TV who claimed God had saved them from drowning or losing their sight or whatever. Life was funny, thinks Fred. One minute you were slurping down egg salad sandwiches in your kitchen before a ball game and not an hour later you were up here with God and everything. He feels vaguely hungry at the thought of egg salad, which is troubling. It was going to be a long afterlife if you could still get hungry.

But the white around him is peaceful, comforting, and he forgets to be worried about it. The thing that had looked like his father is gone, but the afterglow of that touch remains: a soothing warmth at the crown of his head. He thinks he could lie here in the grass for quite awhile. If those people would just stop talking, maybe he’d be able to fall asleep.

“He’ll have a concussion, definitely, But the recovery should be straightforward from here on out. His vitals have stabilized-”

Who’s up here with him, and what the hell are they talking about? Fred tries to turn his face away from the sound, but it hurts his neck to move. There’s a rushing in his head again, a strange heat in his ears, and a stabbing pain that doesn’t belong in the white place.

“How long until he wakes up?”

 _No_ , he thinks unhappily, feeling the gradual slippage of the calm place, the growing, distinct throb of his injured head. Someone is holding his left hand in a firm, heavy grip, tying him down to the world where the pain is. Yet he can still feel the grass under his palms, hear the far-off music.

He wonders if Al struck Jerry out.

“Jee-ZUS, Freddy.” That’s the voice that really wakes him up, thirteen-year-old Linny and her interminable tact.

“Don’t you take the name of the Lord in vain, Linda.” That’s his mother, and hers is the hand he feels on his.

Fred lets out a noise he would have been ashamed of in front of his baseball teammates - mostly a whimper, kind of a moan, and hears their anxious voices rise around him like the buzzing of insects. There’s a very bright light in his face, and he narrows his eyes into slits.

"Freddie." He knows this one is Susie, though he can't see her: sixteen years old the year Fred was seven, with a curtain of honey-blonde hair, the blondest hair in the family. At sixteen, Susie was riding the shockwaves of her very first breakup - a good-for-nothing RHS lacrosse player named Logan, who she'd planned to go to the back-to-school dance with. Susan now lamented her datelessness nightly on the phone to her best friend Brenda, while Linny and Pammy screeched that they needed to use the line and that Susan's breakup was absolutely obliterating their own social lives. Fred was secretly of the opinion that Susan could get any boy she wanted if she tried, and that this Logan sounded like a real chump to have let her slip.

"Your Logan isn't worth a pail to spit in," Fred's dad had said once, and Fred agreed.

Logan did like baseball, apparently, which was a slim point in his favour - Fred had never seen him play any, but he'd overhead Susan telling Brenda that she'd let Logan get to second base with her at Miller's Point, in what he assumed was a pick-up game the two of them had organized the night before. He's twelve before he finds out Miller's Point is where high school students go to _park_ , and even then he's not sure why they don't just use the parking lot by the school if they need somewhere to keep their cars.

Susan's not a crier by a long shot - she had yet to lose a single tear over Logan, and she's not crying now, but sounds pretty close. He’s pleased to realize that lacrosse player Logan is the last thing on her mind right now, and congratulates himself on having at least momentarily dissuaded her heartbreak.

"I'm okay, Suze" he tries to tell her, but his tongue is so dry that the words don't come out, and moving his mouth is painful.

Susie's his favourite sister, even though he knows he's not supposed to play favourites, and he has the sneaking, dreadful, repeated idea that if his four sisters were lined up over an abyss like tin soldiers on the laundry chute and he had three pellets in his BB gun and something was making him shoot, Susie would be the one he would spare. The implausibility of this scenario does little to reassure him. Families aren’t supposed to have favourites.

At seven Fred views their teenage relationships with a kind of eager reverence: a part of their adult world that he can't yet understand but will one day be ushered into. He figures he'll knows better than anyone how to be a good boyfriend when the time comes, because he's spent all this time hearing about his sisters' conquests: the good, the bad, the awful. He's unconsciously picked up an understanding of words like _dreamy_ and _crush_ , and he's sworn an oath to never, never, never, _never_ break anyone's heart (he doesn't know as of yet that he's a heartbreaker through and through, and that try as he might he's going to leave a trail of shattered hearts behind him, boys and girls both).

He's going to be an early bloomer in that regard - all those older girls in the house, it was only natural, the tea ladies in his neighbourhood will say - and some variation of Casanova will be his permanent nickname by the time he's fifteen, but at seven all he cares about is baseball. If Mary and Hermione had been standing by the wood fence watching the game, as they would be more and more often in the next few years, he wouldn't even have glanced at them.

The music is all but gone now. There's a high pitched buzzing in his ears, like a swarm of a thousand flies, and it occurs to him to use his hat to swat at them. Only his arm still doesn't move, and he can't tell if his hat is still on his head or not.

“Give him space, Linda.”

Fred knows that voice, and it settles in him with a jolt that both relaxes and electrifies him. "Dad-" he croaks, almost voiceless, straining toward the sound. His father finds his free hand and catches it.

"I'm here, Freddie. You're safe."

It catches him as funny, and he smiles: an ironic twist at the corners of his lips. "Safe on second." he mumbles, tongue dry as cotton, and manages a grin.

His father's laugh is the last thing he hears before he passes out.


	2. Second Inning

Fred doesn't tell either of them about seeing God in the baseball diamond, mostly because he doesn't want to be roped into a book contract like every other little kid who's had a near death experience and seen a bright light, but also because he figures they'll never believe him. His mother was a devout Presbyterian, his father a devout Darwinist. When his sisters were little the family went to church every Sunday, but by the time Fred was born the rules had relaxed somewhat, and his mother had conceded that her daughters (and her husband's) relationship with the Lord was their own business. She still offered to take Fred with her every Sunday, and mostly he went, because he liked Sunday school and singing the hymns, and it made his mother happy, even if he'd rather be out by the baseball diamond. If he was lucky, Al was sometimes there. His mom always said Al's parents needed God a bit more than the rest of them. 

Fred at seven believes in God as a matter of course, but he has some serious questions about the big guy that his Sunday school teacher can't give satisfactory answers to. There also seems to be a remarkable amount of dissent among the members of his own family on the topic. Debbie, his oldest sister, says God is a woman, and is in all natural things, the same as the force they call Mother Nature or Mother Earth. God for Debbie is in the trees and the sun and the ocean, which Fred finds interesting, but ultimately implausible. The ocean cannot manifest into his father and stroke his forehead, after all. 

Pammy, in turn, believes Jesus was a real person, but that religion itself is ultimately an elaborate sham. She's in the habit of prodding at the cover of Linny's Children's Bible and reminding them all that the real Jesus didn't look anything like the picture, but was a brown-skinned immigrant. Fred’s mom always gets this weary look in her eyes when she does, and he’s not sure why. 

Susie has suggested to him that God, like Santa Claus, is less of a person and more of an innate feeling - an unseen force of goodness and righteousness that exists in all of them. Fred loves Susan, but he hadn’t liked this answer any more than Linda’s - which was that he better quit bugging her with questions unless he wanted a knuckle sandwich for lunch. He had gone then to the place he always went when his sisters’ and his mother’s answers failed to satisfy him: to the man whose opinion he treasured most of all. 

A month and a half before he'd almost died at the hands of Jerry Mason's home run, he'd broached the question of God to his father on the back porch. It was a late June afternoon, warm enough to feel like summer, and the newly mown grass was sending up the hot scent of earth and sunlight. They’d just finished a game of catch, and Fred was banging his outfielder’s glove against his shin as his father drained his third beer of the evening. 

His father had seemed oddly introspective for a Sunday, quiet. There was something appealingly approachable in his quietude, and Fred had asked the question without expecting a honest reply, trusting in his father but still knowing it was his dad’s prerogative to spew whatever vaguely reassuring mumbo-jumbo he felt Fred needed to hear. But his reply, after a great hesitation and some vague gestures to the exact half-hearted affirmations Fred had been expecting, was honest.

"I believe in something," says his dad at last, the beer bottle dangling from his fingers, "something out there that keeps bad things from happening to people like you and me, something that makes little coincidences happen. I believe in something that keeps trains on their rails most of the time, and airplanes from dropping out of the sky, and Jam (Jam was their cat) from tangling with that fox that’s been around here. I don't think it's God like in the bible, but it's something, and I think you can feel it when it rains at night - when it's a real electricity storm and you hear that cracking." 

Another kid might have been disappointed in such an answer, but Fred idolized his father and had swallowed the words keenly, committed them to memory even as he didn’t understand them. 

"He's a hard man to love sometimes," Fred's mother had said to him once, "but he's your father and we'll do the best we've got." Fred hadn't understood that. He'd never found it hard to love his dad. 

They bury Jam on a Friday in April, and Linny does the whole “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” spiel with the conviction of a real pastor. Al tags along just for something to do. Fred starts crying like a baby and Susan, who at seventeen was only humouring the situation for his benefit, hugs him extra-tight. 

For the first time in his life, (but certainly not the last) it doesn't help. Some things were too big and too bad to be solved with a hug, even from your favourite sister. Some things were too dark and too deep and too lonely. 


	3. Third Inning

When Mary finds out she’s pregnant, it’s the happiest day of his life. 

He tells everyone he encounters: Pop Tate, the grocer, the plumber, the neighbours. Riverdale is a small town and the news moves fast. Most of the residents have known him since high school, and shower him in congratulations. He is, in some small way, achieving everything that he ever wanted. 

He stops believing in God when she loses the baby. 


	4. Fourth Inning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter deals in a non-graphic way with suicidal thoughts, miscarriage, depression and divorce. Please take the best care of yourselves!

"Freddie, don't cry," Susan begs on the phone, because Fred had always been the crier, the sensitive one. "I'm sorry." 

She offers to come down to see him - three of Fred’s sisters had left Riverdale by then, and later it will be all four and even his mother: it was always Fred the homebody, just as Fred was the crier - but Fred tells her not to come.  _ Did Dad ever talk to you about God? _ He wants to ask.  _ Because he told me there was something, but there isn’t. There’s nothing out there that keeps bad things from happening, in fact, it’s probably the opposite.  _

But he doesn’t ask. 

Susan offers to call his parents, tell them they’re not getting a grandkid after all, but Fred takes that distinct pleasure up upon himself. His mother cries, and then showers him in guilty apologies. His father is all but silent. Fred isn’t sure which one is worse. 

“Don’t worry,” his father says at last, gruffly, when Fred’s run out of words to explain and is only breathing shakily into the receiver. “You’ll have another shot at it.” 

Another shot at it. Like it was a calculus exam you could make up, or a botched high jump on track and field day.  _ Don’t worry champ _ , he thinks, _ you’ll get ‘em next time _ , and howls with sick, disconsolate laughter. 

His father lets him do it, the silence on the other end as still and as complete as the air of a tomb. “You’d better calm down before I give the phone back to your mother,” he says at last, and Fred does, as quickly and as immediately as if his dad had thrown a switch. But it’s too late. There is a fumble with the receiver, and then his father goes away and his mother is back on the line. 

He and Mary have broken his parents hearts, he knows that. They are not feeling the loss of grandchildren - Debbie, Pam, and Susie had already taken care of that, in various ways - Debbie in particular had made Fred an uncle at a very young age. Instead it’s Fred’s loss they’re feeling, because out of all their children it had been him who’d wanted them the most. 

His mother had driven out to their new yellow house that night to see them. She had offered no excuse for his father’s glaring absence, and had spent most of the visit alone with Mary upstairs. Fred had spent the evening by himself on the porch, pushing the porch-swing with his feet and wondering how imprudent it would be to smash his beer bottle over the railing and use the glass to end everything. 

He doesn’t, and not only because he doesn’t want Alice Cooper to be the first one to find the body when the sun comes up. But it’s the first time in his life that the thought of suicide has entered his head, fully-formed, and it frightens him in some small, primal way to know that a way out could be so near to hand. To know that he had moved in the course of some small early-morning hours on Tuesday from a man who would never entertain the notion of such a thing to one who has slipped effortlessly into the dark. 

It’s over a week later when his father shows up at his door, looking old and tired and almost apologetic. “How about we take a walk,” he had asked, and sounded oddly insecure about it, as if he were frightened Fred would refuse him. Fred can count on one hand the number of times he has heard this tone in his father’s voice before. 

They walk for a long while out in the woods, the autumn sunshine cutting in great golden bursts through the trees, the dying leaves crackling under their feet (Fred’s feet are a whole size-and-a-half bigger than his dad’s, and it’s one of those things he’ll remember forever about the two of them, that they hadn’t been able to share shoes without his toes pinching after he turned sixteen.) He’d assumed that his father had taken him out there to talk, but Mr. Andrews had never been a capable man when it came to words, and they only walk in silence as they both want desperately for this shared time to be enough. 

It takes them a few hours to get cold enough to go back in, and even by the time they do his father has not found the words to reassure him, and Fred has not found the words to ask him to. The first words his father speaks are abrupt, shattering the silence even as they taste faintly of the same uncertainty with which he had asked Fred if he would take a walk. 

“Mary had a big family, didn’t she?” 

“Four siblings,” answers Fred automatically. “Same as us.” 

“She’s got strong blood, then,” his father had said. “It’ll happen.” 

He’ll think of that later when he comes down one morning to find the note she’d left for him: the one that he remembers as only saying, in essence, what that Meat Loaf song had said: i  _ want  _ you, i  _ need _ you, but  _ there ain’t no way i’m ever gonna love you _ , oh, and can you figure out how to explain this to our fourteen year old son before he leaves for school? 

_ Two out of three ain’t bad, is it Mary _ , he will think, holding the thin sheaf of notebook paper in the middle of the kitchen that was no longer theirs. And then, a ghost of his father’s voice like a spike into his forehead:  _ She’s got strong blood.  _

"Don't talk to me," she says once, a couple days after he and his dad had taken that walk, "until you know what it's like to be pregnant one second and then not the next. Until you know what that feels like, don't talk to me. Don't even come near me." 

For awhile he thinks, this is the end of it. Of the marriage, of his family, of everything. Crossing the construction site at night, he stops often by a wide gulf of a concrete pit and thinks about falling. Spreading his arms and dropping like a stone. 

For almost two months he feels nothing but absence: a slow dying and decay of every dream and wish and hope he'd had for himself. Something keeps him from that concrete pit, not God, surely - but Something, Maybe his father's God- the crackle in the air of an electricity storm, the thing that kept trains on their rails. He loses ten pounds in a week. If anyone’s God minds that Fred’s stopped believing, He doesn’t show it. Fred wants to step on the crib he’d started in the garage until it’s splinters - do the same with the board he’d saved from the construction site because it would make the base of a dynamite treehouse one day - but can’t muster the energy. He doesn’t have the energy for anything but work and sleep. Even his occasional bouts of crying become too wearying and peter off. 

They start trying again in November. For awhile he thought Mary would be too disgusted to touch him, but she isn't. In fact, the sex is good - probably the best they've ever had. For near on two months he's been a walking corpse but something changes in him now, brings the optimist back out in him. He's been faking it for Mary's benefit all along - telling her it'll happen, that they aren't licked yet, without believing the words. But he believes fervently now in something, maybe destiny - his own destiny, which he has always believed was to be a father - or the payoff of hard work, or that the universe has taken something from them and now needs to pay them their due. 

He realizes, as he sings to Mary to make her smile, as he scrubs the kitchen floor to a shine, as he sweeps whole armfuls of pregnancy tests off grocery store shelves, that it's himself he believes in, and then, the possibility of his unborn child- the child that as of yet does not exist. He understands suddenly what it means to believe in God at all- to truly believe in something for which there is no concrete proof, nothing but suggestion and hope. The sight of fathers with their kids at the park no longer feels like a personal slight, but fills him with an insurmountable longing and a flooding warmth. He can sense his salvation so close to him sometimes that he can almost taste it. 

They are broken but not beaten. They are determined. One, two, three pregnancy tests come back negative, and yet they are undeterred. After the sixth little blue line (sorry, try again, or  _ don’t worry champ, you’ll get ‘em next time _ ) they start picking out nursery colours. Mary thinks Fred's choices are garish, Fred thinks hers are too traditional. There's no gender to plan for because there's no baby, but they both agree yellow wouldn't be too bad. Yellow like their house, the one they’d bought with a family in mind. Yellow like the daffodils in the garden where he’d grown up. 

He builds the rest of that crib in the garage. There's still no baby. 

Pregnancy test number fourteen - coincidentally, the same number he'd been wearing when that fastball had dented his skull - comes back red. 


	5. Top Of The Fifth

At Mary's suggestion, he doesn't tell his parents until they're past twelve weeks - the danger point, and then an extra week for good measure, because she'd been thirteen weeks in last time. He thinks he'll burst with keeping the secret. 

Everyone he's told once week fourteen rolls around looks at him with a mixture of awe and pity, and he knows they’re worried he’s going to get his hopes up. Mary comes home raging over the way the other women at her work talk to her about it: Mary has no interest in shame, or pity. Mary has no interest in silence or meekness on the topic. Mary will kick the stigma around miscarriage into dirt, thank you, and she’ll do it alone if she has to.

Fred, in turn, ignores the misty-eyed, encouraging smiles he gets from neighbours, the ones who imagine somehow they know how it feels: the ones that seem to say  _ gee whiz, isn’t he brave?  _ Anyone who gives him that look in front of Mary is in danger of getting slugged. Fred tells her not to bother getting angry. It doesn’t matter what people think. 

Nothing matters except what comes next. 


	6. Fifth Inning

Archie's three weeks premature and perfect. 

Mary grips Fred’s hand as he’s being delivered, and he squeezes back just as hard. That’s the best they ever were: that gold-and-white summer day, lacing their fingers as they press palm to palm, matching the pressure of each other's hands. For those few hours in the hospital in the middle of the day they are suspended forever as the best version of themselves, the one they promised to be on their wedding night. There has never been a better Fred-and-Mary than now and perhaps there never will be again. They are giving each other the greatest gift imaginable.  Mary cries holding her son, and Fred realizes for the first time that until now she may not have truly believed she would ever get to do so. 

They hand the baby to him to hold, and Fred’s lack of spiritual belief reverses with the speed and singularity of a line drive leaving home plate. Not only is there a God, but He is benevolent, and He is loving, and Fred is holding everything anyone’s ever told him about glory in his arms. 

He looks for the first time into Archie’s face and every thought of his own life up to this point is wiped as cleanly from his head as if it had been emptied. His breath catches and holds. The tears Mary had kicked him in the shins for in the hallway (“I’m the one in labour, not you,”) run immediately and permanently dry. Fred has no more fears, no preoccupations: everything that has ever hurt him has ceased to matter. He cares no more about himself than he cares about the limp, browning houseplant on the window ledge. In a matter of painless, wonderful seconds, his life has peacefully ceased to be his own. 

His ears are rushing again, his lungs scraping without breath, and yet he doesn’t bother to let oxygen in. He understands at last what he was put on earth to do. He knows at once that the tiny, breathing life in his arms matters more than anything he has ever known or seen and that he would do anything for this child without question. Fred holds his son and feels a trembling, aching happiness unlike anything he has ever felt before, feels it start from the very middle of him and fill him like sunlight. The hospital room is swimming around him, the sunlight glowing as white-hot as heaven. 

“Catch him,” says someone - it sounds like Mary, and he feels a short spike of annoyance at her for saying it ( and maybe that’s the first tickle of it, even on the happiest day of their shared lives, the big awful something that’s going to grow into their divorce one day.) Two pairs of hands come up on each side of him and he feels himself being pushed carefully down into a hospital chair. 

They’ve taken the baby out of his arms lest he drop him, and rather than being annoyed, Fred wants to laugh at their ignorance, at how little they understand. He would not have dropped his son even if he had fainted all the way to the floor. He could no more have dropped him than he could have picked up a nearby scalpel and impaled it through his own throat. 


	7. Sixth Inning

Fred’s dad dies on a Tuesday: rainy, damp, and cold. He hears the news over the phone from his mother around nine that night, as he and Mary are debating whether to turn off the TV and go to bed or sit through another rerun.

“I’m glad he got to meet Archie,” Mary tells him, and rather than reassuring him, it just pisses him off. As if he was supposed to get on his knees and thank God that his three-year old would one day have a feeble, child’s memory of his father from the few times Grandpa Andrews had taken him to the zoo or built with him in the sandbox. It wasn’t fair. Not when Debbie’s kids and Susie’s kids and Pammy’s kids had grown up with both grandparents sending them birthday cards and taking them to the drive-in and going to their middle-school awards nights.

Or, at least, their kids could have had if they hadn’t all _split_ , left the town - their town - behind them they way you’d kick off your shoes on a dance floor. Sure, Pammy hadn’t gone _far_ , and Linda’s still around - living with her husband in one of those new little developments down on Camdale Road - but Fred resents the rest of them in some small way for distancing themselves from their family home, from their parents. Love is duty, he had heard Mary’s older sister say once, and still believed it. Love was selflessness, and love was roots.

They do come back though, husbands and pets and nieces and nephews in tow, so that every room in the big Acorn Way house is filled to bursting with air mattresses and duvets. His mother spends a lot of time with the grandchildren. Even though the house is packed, no one touches Fred’s attic bedroom, the one leftover from his childhood. His mother has saved it for him alone.

“Say bye, Daddy,” Mary urges her son in the driveway. It’s a Thursday afternoon now, and the sun is back out, making Archie’s orange tuft of hair glow like embers. They’re leaving him at his mother and father’s house to spend time with his family. (It’s only in the past few years that he’s begun to think of the yellow house as _his_ , as _theirs_ , and this one as _Mom and Dad_ ’s. He supposes it’s just Mom’s now. That’ll take awhile longer to get used to, only he won’t have to, because she sells it within the year.)

“Bye Daddy,” answers Archie obediently, with the solemnity only a three-year-old can muster. Fred kisses him on the head. His son smells like sweetness and baby shampoo and everything good in the world.

“You’ll see Daddy really soon,” Mary promises him, “tomorrow morning.”

Archie accepts this wordlessly, and doesn’t fuss - it’s Fred who expects to toss and turn all night, because he hasn’t spent a night apart from Archie since he was born. If love is duty, it’s a lot more complicated now. He has two separate families in two separate houses. It’s wonderful, but it’s new, and he hasn’t learned how to navigate it yet. Hasn’t learned how to spread his roots.

They wave at him from the windows of the car until they’re out of sight.

* * *

The funeral is full of what a younger Alice would have called _religious bullshittery_ , and Fred can’t begin to guess at what his atheistic father would have thought of it all. Linda keeps catching his eye - first with a smirk at the religious bullshittery, knowing full well their dad would have hated it, and then again when Debbie and Pam get up to talk about their dad and tell a dismaying amount of stories that take place before either Fred or Linda were alive. Mr and Mrs Andrews had had their first three children in four years. Lin and Fred existed by virtue of failed contraceptives and sheer dumb luck.

For the few weeks after they put his dad in the ground (it still doesn’t connect for him, that his dad is _gone_ , that he’s buried somewhere, mouldering, because he used to be so upright and so _alive_ , used to play catch with him on this lawn, used to go for walks with him in the autumn woods) the house stays full. In-laws and outlaws and grandkids and pets and all kinds of people come and go - from the Acorn way home to nearby hotels and back again. Fred’s mom hosts them all like a pro: finds room for everyone, supplies meals, keeps flowers on the table. (There’s no shortage of flowers in the house, which is ironic, because his dad had had allergies all his life.) Fred thinks if he were in her place he would have thrown a sleeve of saltine crackers at them and let them fight it out like birds.

He is shown pictures of his father from before he had ever known him: his father as a man of twenty, holding Debbie, holding Pam, holding Susan - all three eldest girls at the zoo, in the garden, in the old kitchen that had been renovated long before Fred’s birth - the family that they had once been without him in it. Pictures of his mother, Susie in her arms on the swing, their hair twin shades of blonde, not knowing or guessing that she’d have two more babies in the next half-dozen years. He learns about dreams and ambitions his father had harboured long before he’d met him, ones he’d kept in spite of Fred’s being, ones he’d never realized by the time he got up from his chair to go to the window and collapsed into the heart attack that would kill him.

Even old jokes hurt, or maybe they hurt most of all - things that he had never known his father would have laughed at. Fred realizes little by little that the six of them - himself, Linda, Susie, Debbie, Pam, and their mother -  are not even mourning the same man. He finds a Christmas card from not long after Linda was born, addressed to his parents _and the girls_.

 _But I was his boy_ , he thinks, holding it. _I was his boy and he loved me best._

And that was true even if Debbie was tougher and Pam was smarter and Susie could hit harder and Linda could swear better. It was an Andrews family truth: one of the acknowledged skeletons in their boneyard of a closet. Freddie was the only boy, and Freddie was the baby, and Freddie was the favourite. Especially when it came to their dad.

Linda is a grief eater, and he finds her a few days after the funeral sitting cross-legged in the rapidly-emptying room that had always held their biggest Christmas tree, devouring a stale, family-size bag of doritos on the white rug. The one their mother would have flayed them alive for eating on when they’d been younger.

Fred sits down beside her and shoves his hand in the bag. Linda gets that older-sister look on her face for a moment, like she’s going to kick his ass for doing it, but then concedes. Susie might be his favourite sister, but he and Lin had grown up together, knew each other best. The chips taste like dust in his mouth. He may as well have been eating styrofoam and wall insulation.

He’s done his crying at this point - wet, gasping, snotty crying on his knees in the bathroom, crying until he threw up, tears and spit all over his face. Fallen asleep on the tile with his head throbbing and one of his oldest sisters - Debbie, he thinks - crouching beside him, combing back his sweaty hair and saying _poor kid_ , like he was eight years old with a stomach flu instead of almost thirty and heartsick. What comes over him now as he sits on the rug is something different, a helpless, overwhelming emptiness that seems to come over him from the inside out.

“Do you believe in God, Lin?” His voice is as dry as old floorboards. He creaks like a house needing to be torn down.

“Dunno. Some of it. Not all of it.” Linda licks cheese dust off her index finger. “Sometimes I wish they just told us to believe in it or not.”

“Me too,” says Fred softly. “Me too.”

His room is just the way he’d left it, though the Union Jack flag has come loose from some of the thumbtacks that held it to the ceiling and hangs crookedly down toward his bed. Some of the posters have fallen down, too, but his mom has been in to dust and has left them in a neat stack on his desk. Bruce Springsteen is still up - probably thirty years old in the picture, the ink sun-bleached and barely legible. Fred touches it the way you touch a rosary.

For a place so packed with people, the attic of the house is almost unbearably silent. The open window lets in a little night breeze, but the Northside of Riverdale is a quiet place, especially on a weekday. The hum of traffic does nothing to dissuade his loneliness.

He sits on the desk, because he has an idea that if he sank into a chair he’d never be able to get up again, would curl up on himself like a child and cry himself to death. He used to labour over his high school homework here, back when that was the most important thing in the world. FP had fucked him on this desk once, but that’s not what you want to think about after putting your dad in the ground, so he tries not to let that particular memory in.

He reaches out and his hand touches the only thing that’s out of place, here - an old, tube-type Motorola radio that had once lived in their front room, and then for a while in their garage. Someone must have tucked it up here at some point, out of the way.

He doesn’t expect it to work when he starts working his way along the FM band, but the sound comes through, if a bit faint and staticy. He moves his way through toothpaste commercials, french talk shows, Dire Straits singing _Sultans of Swing_ . Static on the next channel, ghostly and sharp. He catches a few faint, sweet snatches of _Summer of 69_ , but passes it by. That one was a little too palpable right now.

“Gimme some SPRINGSTEEN!” he screams when the radio won’t oblige, a loaded, inarticulate below. “Give me some FUCKING SPRINGSTEEN!”

The radio doesn’t, and he swipes it to the floor in a rush of anger: it hits the carpet and sits there, silent. Too late he remembers his dad hadn't even _liked_ Springsteen, had called his LP of The River “that noise.”

 _I turned off that noise, dad_ , thinks Fred, and hears an absurd little laugh wrench its way out of his throat. _I turned it off for you._

He wakes up later in the middle of the night and crawls to the radio because the attic seems so far away and he needs anything, even _Sultans of Swing._ Just human voices.

“Come on Bryan”, he mutters under his breath as he spins the dial. “Tell me how you got your first real six string at the five and dime.”

But there’s nothing, even the toothpaste commercials are gone now. He hits static, static and more static: when there is sound it’s as echo-y and far away as if he were listening from underwater. It’s an old radio, and he’s hunting through signals far outside of Riverdale now. If there was ever anyone out in the blackness, they’ve left him when he needs them the most.

_An apt metaphor for religion, don’t you think, Fred?_

He’s thinking this as he switches to the AM dial, and after about five minutes of fiddling, he picks something up through the static, a voice speaking so low he has to hunch closer to hear it

_“And it’s the Mariners up one-nothing in the second inning, Scott Erickson on the mound-”_

It’s a baseball game. His dad used to listen to baseball on this radio out in the garage, and whenever Fred would run by he’d holler out: “What’s the score?” or “Who’s playing?” and his dad would tell him. Fred could never keep track of the schedules - probably why he doesn’t even think to question now why the Series is opening at 2am in October. It was on the radio, and he’d listen to it. Simple as that.

“Who’s playing?” he whispers instead, and the radio answers him as obligingly as his father always had on those summer afternoons, like it’d had had the answer ready for him to ask.

_“And that’s the Mariners and Orioles starting up the Series tonight, and we’ve got everything right here from Baltimore, from your favourite radio station - WKZH AM -”_

Fred doesn't give a good sweet goddamn about the Orioles, but he stays curled there anyway, listening to the rise and fall of his own breathing. He’s too lonely to wonder who the hell is out there playing baseball at two am, especially when he’s a hundred and fifty miles away from Baltimore. You heard what you needed to hear. And he needs this now, alone in his bedroom, heavy with the knowledge he'd come into accidentally as a boy of eighteen, that parents were as fragile and frightened and ultimately fallible as you were. Alone with the knowledge that he would never see his father again, would never hear his voice or even touch him.

He knows he looks like shit when he comes down for breakfast the next morning, but they’re a household in mourning, and no one comments, not even to say _poor kid_. Linda is stuffing a stack of pancakes as tall as her arm into her mouth.

“Are the Orioles playing?” he asks. The three sisters at the table turn to give him near-identical looks of confusion and distaste.

“No offense, Freddie,” says Linda, “But what the fuck are you talking about?”

Fred is unfazed. _You heard what you needed to hear_ , isn’t that what he’d thought deliriously to himself last night? He’s tired enough that his vision is tripling. He’d probably broken that radio when he’d swept it to the ground in the closest thing he’d had to a temper tantrum since he was Archie’s age. If he tried to find a _WKZH AM_ this morning, he’d probably just get static.

(What’s the score, you ask? Well, it’s Fred Andrews up one-nothing, with one sleepless night without his dad behind him, let’s see if he can go for two, or three, or four, or the rest of his whole _goddamn_ life)

“Nothing, Lin,” he says, and shoves a plate of grapes away from his spot at the table so he can sit down. “Nothing at all.”


	8. Seventh Inning

Fred loses his virginity at sixteen in the back of a VW bus they call the  _ Shaggin’ Wagon  _ even before the event. That first time, it’s parked by the place where Sweetwater River runs off through some woods into a babbling brook. There’s a half-gutted rainbow trout laying sentry on a rock outside, it’s yellow eye rolled back toward the van’s rear doors, which they’ve cracked against the heat.

In 1991, you can fish wherever you want on the banks of Sweetwater and Fred’s fishing permit gets more use than their van does. Ally’s dad is a hunter proper, has offered them both the use of his rifles if they want to catch any  _ real _ game, (Fred doesn’t like the way he says  _ real _ , his eyes too alive and too hungry, twin coal pits burning fire inside his face) but neither of them are interested. FP has never hurt an animal and calls hunting a sadistic murder game. Fred has a hard enough time watching the fish they catch for eating flop around as they run out of oxygen. 

So they fish, and it’s on one of these fishing trips that FP teaches him how to be touched like he’s never been touched before, to love like he never thought his body was capable of. 

Fred comes back with an empty creel (they cook and eat the trout on the banks as a post-coital celebration meal) and a ring of hickeys around his neck like a medal. He’s not sure he comes back a _man_ , exactly, but he feels bigger somehow, more living. He’s also happier than he can ever remember being. He decides as a result of that trip that there is no greater feeling imaginable than love in the summer. To be lucky enough to love and be loved in the summertime is to have everything. 

They’ve made love on futons, on football fields; carpets and couches and classrooms and both of their teenage bedrooms: Fred’s attic wide and airy, FP’s trailer bedroom the size and darkness of a closet, with the bed touching every wall. 

They’re in the bedroom that used to be Fred-and-Mary’s, now, and there’s an AC/DC song playing on the tape deck.  _ You really took me and you shook me all night long _ . The sheets have just been changed, and the bed is huge and white and soft. It’s their first time making love in a proper bed in a long time: It might be their first time ever making love in a bed large enough to comfortably hold two full grown humans (He always felt that they had to be half acrobat to get it on in his twin size bed). It’s definitely Fred’s first time making love in _ this _ bed in awhile. His first time in a long time loving anyone at all. 

He knows a lot more about summers on this Sunday morning: summers have claws and jaws and can tear your guts out, spill redheaded kids into the river that used to be his safe place. Summers bring dark things out while everyone good has their eyes upturned to the fourth of july fireworks show, and the dark things don’t leave. Maybe they’ve been growing for awhile, the way reeds grow in a bog: thick and clotted and oily under the water. 

But those are things that seem very far away from this place, the buttercup yellow of his adult bedroom, where dust tumbles in the light through his closed window and the sun makes gold patterns on the walls. Far away from the autumn he's in now, the one that still feels like summer with the window shut. A season that still feels like it might be nice for loving. 

FP’s on top of him, kissing him sweet, his warm fingers working the buttons open on Fred’s flannel shirt. Fred’s arms are hooked tight around his friend’s bare back, the morning sun through the window raising beads of sweat under his fingertips. FP’s tongue presses insistently into his mouth as he opens Fred’s shirt, hot and whole, his knees dimpling the mattress on each side of Fred’s hips. Every time their skin brushes the shock is like an electric current. Every nerve ending in his body is flaming, his throat pulsing with anxiety, his fingers laced to keep from trembling. The want and the need and the love (yes, love) are the only constants in the sky-blue Sunday morning of his mind, everything else is only feeling. 

FP stops kissing him long enough to duck his head to Fred’s newly bare chest and put his hot mouth over one of his nipples. Fred cries out when he does it, curls his toes involuntarily into the white sheets and jerks upward into his touch. FP flattens a strong palm to Fred’s shoulder to keep him there, teeth and tongue working steadily on Fred’s chest until he feels fireworks exploding behind his eyes. His body is trembling and he whimpers, pressing it into the back of his hand to keep it in. 

FP fastens one hand in Fred’s hair, licking a delicate line up the side of his throat as he tugs his head back further into the pillows. Fred feels the tickle of teeth against his skin, and waits for a moment for FP to bite him, but realizes he’s only smiling into his neck.

“Oh, Freddie,” FP murmurs, one hand still tugging his neck exposed, the other moving to grip tight to his thigh, speaking in a tone that makes tingles explode up and down Fred’s back. “Someone hasn’t been loving you right.” 

His jeans are so tight. He hasn’t had FP’s full, naked weight on top of him since they were kids. FP plants kisses all over his upturned jaw, moving down his neck and to his chest, kissing a trail down his stomach. Fred is trembling. 

“Ss-hh, Freddie,” soothes FP. “Just relax. I got you.” 

_ I got you _ , he’d whispered, and he had, hadn’t he - that day by the brook, the whole time they were partners, the night outside the bar when he’d clapped a hand intimately on his upper arm and promised to do what he could - hadn’t FP always  _ had _ him like this, held him this tightly. FP sighs into the skin of his stomach and Fred whimpers again and bucks his hips up against FP’s body. 

“Fred,” murmurs FP, beginning to slide his bare hips in a rhythm against him, a movement as constant and sure as the rain. His hand traces a path down Fred’s side, to the top of his jeans. “I don’t think anyone’s touched you like this in a long time.” 

FP’s fingers fit into Fred’s palm and he grips them, holds his hand as an anchor to tie him to this place, this bed, because everything is so soft and so right that he feels in danger of slipping into it and taking all leave of his senses. He feels full, impossibly full - full of golden light. FP kisses him again, and the heavy press of his tongue tastes like coming home, the hot friction of him over Fred’s groin filling his head with a heady, tingling rush that wipes out all capacity for rational thought. 

“F-” he gasps urgently, pushing him away. FP’s name doesn’t need shortening, but Fred’s been a nickname-giver all his life, and has been known to affectionately drop the second syllable. He gasps it out now because it’s the only thing his mind can grasp onto.  “F- F- I’m going to-” 

FP doesn’t laugh as he’d expected, only pauses and lifts himself enough to put distance between them, a slight smile on his face. “Baby,” he murmurs lovingly, and lays his hand on Fred’s bare stomach with a touch he feels all the way down to his toes. He leans in and kisses Fred again, scraping the stubble of his mouth over Fred’s lips before reaching down and unbuckling Fred's belt and jeans in a movement so coordinated it could have been practiced. 

“You taste so good,” whispers FP when he comes back up, using his one hand to slide Fred’s jeans lower down on his hips, doing it as if he’s done it a thousand times. 

“What do I taste like?” 

“Sweet.” His big hand brushes the soft inside of Fred’s thigh before moving back up and cupping his chin, pressing his mouth back to him before continuing to speak. “You taste sweet and you taste safe and warm like summer, like a melting popsicle.”

Fred’s pretty sure he tastes like half a glass of wine and hastily scarfed breath mints, but he’ll take it. FP lowers himself back down onto him, their bare chests pressed flush together, skin to skin. There’s light flashing in front of his eyes, like the reflection of sunlight off a mirror. 

FP’s holding him so tight, tighter than anyone else ever has. Fred tilts his head back and stares at the ceiling, the dizzying way the lights above him blur into a shapeless mass of white. He lets FP push into him and sees forever, sees heaven open up above him in endless brightness and calm, in the sizzling heat that starts in his belly and rides down to his legs. He grips FP’s skin with nerveless, slippery fingers, his head full of luminescence and roaring ecstasy. 

“ _F-_ ” he gasps again, but it’s lost to the brightness, and as FP thrusts into him one last time before he comes it’s all he sees: oblivion pouring into his senses in a incredible, blinding rush of white, filling his awareness with all of it, pushing everything else out forever. 


	9. Bottom Of The Seventh

Cicadas, he realizes, thirty-five years later, with FP drying on his thighs. That sound he hadn’t been able to pick out in the place where he’d seen God, at age seven. It was the suburban buzz of cicadas in the distance, the night music of his hometown in the summer. He rolls over in bed, presses his face into the white linen. It was cicadas he’d been hearing, and he hears them now, a chorus outside his window in the night. 

That’s his last thought before he sleeps, and in the morning he won’t remember it. 


	10. Eighth Inning

Two things are very real to him: that he’s lying on his back in a marsh of hot blood, and that he’s terrified.

The fear is more real than the pain, though there’s plenty of that - his lower half is enclosed in a hot ring of agony through which he can feel the sickening weight of the lead in him, the way his insides have _shifted_ , are still shifting to accommodate it, spilling meaty, liquid pulp that used to be inside of him out over his fingers.

Did he say he was lying here? No, wrong word. He’s dying in this wetland of blood. He’s dying here with it soaking through the back of his coat, pooling thick and liquid in the crook of his hips when the cotton of his shirt can’t collect any more. He’s dying because there’s too much of it. It has to be.

Absurdly, it’s his high school coach’s voice that his darkening mind conjures up in this eleventh hour: Coach Kleats clapping his hands impatiently at him and FP and telling them “late innings, late innings, now, boys, these ones count.”

 _Late innings_ , he thinks, the life flowing hot and terrifying out of him in sheets. _Too late._

And then there’s a third thing, more important even than the terror or the pain, the person kneeling behind him with their knees in his mess of gore and their broken hand pressed to the worst of the bleeding.

“ _Archie_ ,” Fred tries to say, tries to comfort him, but it comes out only a ragged gasp. There’s copper puddling in the back of his throat the way water collects in a ditch after a rainstorm. He can taste it in his mouth and nose: a rusty, human taste like flesh and old metal. The taste of dying. It reminds him of the old sections of downspout he’d replaced the year before Archie was born, the way they’d splintered when he’d removed them so that red rusty shards stuck up from their surface and ripped the skin from his hands. How Mary had dragged him to the hospital even though he _knew_ he’d had his tetanus shot within the year. He remembers the beads of blood rising up from his palms, thin and cold and dark - much different from this blood, the brilliant searing crimson of too late.

_Late innings, now. Late innings._

There's so much he wants to tell his son, so much he hasn't had the chance to, so much he needs to say to him now. The love he feels is as thick as the grief, and it fills his body in a cottony, polluted way until he’s nearly sick with it.

He has no time for prayers now, no last-minute promises of piety. He knows as only the dying know that this will not help him. With his life ebbing out of him onto the floor he looks into the question of eternity and sees only blackness, only unknown. All he knows is that Archie - this Archie, the one cradling him on the ground with tears carving wet tracks down his perfect cheeks - will not be there with him.

And yet he knows, looking up into the brightness of his only child’s eyes, that there is someone out there. He realizes painfully as he’s bleeding out on the floor of his high school hangout that it’s not the fear of dying that’s gripping him but the fear of Archie having to watch him die. Fred stares up into his son’s face the way he looked at him when he was born and decides in this instant both that there is a God, because something like Archie can only be God-given, and that when he gets up there he’s going to haul off and punch God in His all-knowing face for putting his son through this.

His last semi-coherent thought (that no matter how much God looks like his dad he’s going to punch him) is replaced by a rising tide of agony that blacks out his vision and bursts several key components in his nervous system. It hurts so much that it doesn’t hurt anymore.

He can feel the blood leaving his body and it seems to be taking all the heat in him with it: the collapsing synapses of his brain no longer have a word for _cold_ but it’s all he feels. He shivers on the floor of Pop’s - a floor that no longer exists for him - like a child who’s been violently sick. He is caught in a limbo now somewhere between life and death. It’s not the shimmering blackness of a faint, this is a deeper and darker loss of consciousness, a slipping from one place into somewhere else. If he goes he will not come back.

 _No_ , he tries to say with lips that no longer work as the light above him gets brighter and brighter, the _unfair_ ness of it suddenly achingly tangible for him, _no, I'm not done_ -

But he is done, or at least very nearly, his hands have gone numb on Archie’s sleeves and the shaking doesn’t stop. If there was ever a too late, he’s found it.

Those are his last thoughts and then he knows nothing, least of all that he’s dying, and the hurtling final drop of the end of his life takes place in a whiteness that should be familiar to him, one that is not a mist or a fog but everywhere, and as oblivion comes rushing up to meet him he sto


	11. Ninth Inning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 49% of surgeons listen to rock and roll in the operating room

He stops the swing by dragging his feet in the sand.

Fred gets up and dusts some sand off his legs. It’s a fine, balmy summer evening, the sun still warm on his upper arms and the back of his neck. As he stands where he is at the edge of the sandpit a soft breeze gusts along the park toward him, ruffles the grass of the baseball field and sends a small army of crickets chirruping from its sleepy depths. Down where the field slopes toward the road, he can see the staccato siding of a gathering of suburban houses. That’s his old neighbourhood, just a stone’s throw from the park and Pickens Pond. If he starts that way now, he’ll be on Acorn Way in ten minutes.

On the road that runs along the base of the park, a nondescript gold car rolls past the mailboxes, the faint rattle of its loose muffler adding to the noise of the area. There’s music playing from far away, as loud as if it were on speakers, but looking around, Fred doesn’t see any. It’s a tune he recognizes, one he likes. A pair of young women come down the path out of some trees, twittering pleasantly to one another, their voices bright and cheerful in the summer air. The redhead is in an orange tube top, her short hair lit up like fire, the blonde in a striped halter. In the glow of the late-evening sun, their thighs shine honey-gold beneath matching jean cutoffs.

They smile at him as they pass and Fred returns it, feeling a calm sense of inner peace. A few shimmering clouds of gnats have emerged above the grass of the field, and he can hear the buzz of cicadas off in the distance. The air tastes dusty and warm in his lungs, and he notices without much surprise that he feels entirely healthy and whole. The back problems that have been plaguing him for the past five years of his life have vanished, he has no way of telling which knee was ever the bad one. He knows that he could go on standing here for hours without feeling it: could run all the way home without a burn in his lungs.

 _Magic air_ , he thinks, but that’s not it, not really. He checks the inside of his palm and wrist with curiosity, and finds only smooth skin where had once been the deep mark from an errant fishing hook in his childhood. He knows if he lifts the hem of his shirt, the scar from his high school appendectomy will equally have vanished.

A bicycle whirls by down on the road, the small bounty of baseball cards - Fred can’t see, but he knows they’re baseball - flapping against one another in the spokes of the front wheel. After a moment he hears a shout, and two more bikes come powering up the street in a great grinding of chains, their tires coaxing up a soothing _chrrr chrrr_ from the pavement. The taller of the two kids stands up on the pedals, his hair catching the sun for just a moment, and then presses hard down into a sprint and is gone.

It’s summer vacation and kids are at play: he hears them now, under the music and the chirping of cicadas - an elegant chorus of happy voices and loud shrieks. From the basketball net through the trees he can hear the jubilant rattle of the backboard and the slapping of feet. The baseball diamond stretches wide and empty beyond him, gold rays of light extending long over it’s well-kept grass, but he figures it must be almost dinnertime now, and that the kids will be out later. He and his friends used to stay out in the pitch black, swinging their bats blind into the void until their parents had to haul them back home.

The music seems even louder now, and it makes him think faintly of the carousel from the fair, the one he used to ride when he was a little boy. The thought of an ice cream truck also occurs to him, but they rarely make their rounds so close to the park, and this isn’t ice cream truck music.

“Springsteen,” he says, and it _is_ , isn’t it - because this is his dream, or waiting-place, or wherever he finds himself in. It’s also the same song he heard in this place when he was a little boy, though in 1982 there was no way the thing could have been written yet.

“It can’t be the same, though,” he says out loud to the summer air, and yet he knows it is, just as he knows the field beyond the trees is the same one he’d awakened in after a magnificent clout to the head with a fastball, age seven. That Springsteen’s Magic album hadn’t been released until 2007 apparently has no bearing on this place. Fred had once laid in the grass here as a child and listened to a song that was twenty-five years from recording.

He cocks his head like a dog at the sound of his name. It had come off from across the field, down near the mouth of the path where the girls had disappeared. It had sounded like one of his sisters - Pammy, he thinks, though he can’t be certain. Nor is he certain that he had heard it at all: couldn’t it have been a riff in the song, one of the kids on bikes yelling for their friend? If this place _is_ what he _thinks_ it is - and he’s starting to, yeah, though he has no memory of the events that had directly preceded his coming here - his four very alive sisters shouldn’t be here.

But maybe it’s not a real voice at all, maybe it’s a memory: an echo of the impossible amount of times his mother had sent one of his sisters out to call him home from the park across the grass. Either way, something or someone wants him there. Wants him to come home.

He stands for another moment anyways, filling his lungs with the milk-sweet summer air. A jet trail unfolds across the blue of the sky above him like the unfurling of a flag at a Fourth of July parade. Fred beams up at the plane, feeling the fading rays of the summer sun warm the skin of his face. Under the soft, swaying shade of the beechnut trees, he fixes his mind - as he had so often as a child - on the passengers of the tiny white plane, and wishes them well.

Then he sets off toward his house.

Below the houses, lengthening shadows make cool places on the brilliant brown-and-green lawns. The sidewalk he follows sprouts scrubby weeds through the cracks in it, which he dutifully avoids.

_Step on a crack -_

And what? What would happen? Nothing bad here, that was for certain. But there’s that thing they say about old habits, and he doesn’t. Not even once.

On the corner of Oak and Acorn he passes a little girl on rollerblades and steps politely out of her way. At the very end of his street, two little boys are playing catch: the rhythmic _whap_ of ball and leather taps some primal thing in his chest and nearly makes his heart stop with gladness. A third little boy is leaning against a wooden clapboard fence, licking at an ice cream cone (so the truck _had_ been by, then, and recently). A pigtailed girl who Fred presumes to be his sister is hopping up and down trying to get a taste, but the boy is older and holds it out of her way for awhile before conceding.

As he walks along the rows of houses, pinwheels spin merrily from a multitude of front gardens, welcoming him home. It must not be close to the Fourth of July because no one has flags out yet, but the pinwheels are enough: radiating the fading sunlight in eye-catching pinks and blues and silvers. The music gets easier and easier to hear the closer he gets to home, and as his feet carry him past number 14, number 16, number 18, he feels himself speeding up, his heart pounding expectantly.

Maybe his mom will let him take his old car out, he’s already thinking, forgetting that his mother had sold the house years ago and the car even earlier than that. Maybe he could take it downtown to Main Street - he knows somehow that the _old_ Main Street would be waiting for him: the clean whitewashed storefronts and the gleaming new barber pole and big ice cream floats for a dollar-twenty-five. Knows how beautiful it would look this evening with the sun like this, big and golden and low in the sky.

He actually keeps his eyes down, wanting to save the moment he sees it in full. Then he raises his head and it’s there in all it’s bigness and whiteness: 24 Acorn Way, standing behind the scrubby lawn two houses from the north end of the road, the porch light already on. Behind the front windows the curtains are drawn, but the panes themselves are pushed out against the heat so that the curtains slither soothingly against one another in the breeze. Fred has to resist an impulse to yell through the window.

The place he’d grown up. His parents house.

_Home._

As he crosses the warm lawn at a jog and heads toward the porch he sees at last the source of the music: his dad’s old blue Motorola, sitting alone on a side table beside the swing. The yellow power cord has been plugged into an extension, which runs back under the closed door and into the house. The sound gets louder and louder the closer he gets, until he’s standing in front of it and it’s almost screaming.

Moving in slow motion, Fred reaches down and twists the dial experimentally. Nothing changes. It’s the Bruce Springsteen show on all stations, apparently. He sets it back to it’s original position with a kind of reverence, but beneath his pleasure now is the faintest tingle of uncertainty. There’s something just a bit off-putting here, but he can’t put his finger on it.

Fred walks back down the steps to stand back out on the lawn, looking out across the street. There was Mrs. Larson’s house, with the stained-glass lilies still hanging proudly in her bay window. And Mr. Molina’s house - he had been the one with the big black-and-white dalmatian.

 _Fletch_ , he thinks triumphantly, unearthing the dog’s name from some long-forgotten part of his memory. Fletch had lived in that house on the corner. And there was an old grey tomcat -

 _Scratch_. Scratch lived on Maple street, two blocks over. Their cat had been Jam, but Jam and Scratch lived far enough away from each other that they didn’t fight, only prowled accusingly around each other on the outskirts of their respective territory lines. Fred feels a bit like that now. Like he’s slipped by mistake across some invisible border.

 _But I’m home_. Something had called him to this place, called him across the yards and the sidewalks and the whirring sprinklers. Called him to the street where kids rode bikes and played catch, called him the way his sisters used to call him in for meals when he was out.

 _You can call me anything, but don’t call me late for dinner,_ he thinks, and grins to himself. Down on the corner, one of the little boys throws a perfect knuckler and the other one catches it with a clean _whap_.

“Fred.”

He turns. The front door to his house is open now, and standing in the slit of the doorway is his father.

It can’t be. It can’t be, and yet it is. Really his dad this time, not the thing he'd seen when he was seven. Fred stares at him, jaw hanging open, and for a long endless moment he doesn’t allow himself to believe it. But his father steps slightly out of the door onto the porch, and Fred feels the swelling damp of tears behind his eyes and he knows.

His father is looking warmly at him, his eyes proud and loving, a little half-smile on his lips. Old and young at the same time. One of his creased hands settles itself onto the doorknob and Fred’s breath catches in his throat.

 _He left the light on for me_ , Fred realizes, swaying slightly on the grass. _He left the porch light on because he was waiting for me to come home._

“Dad,” he whispers.

His dad smiles at him. _I was never going to see you again_ , Fred thinks, and feels himself tremble, feels the tear sliding down his left cheek before he can help himself, mashes it against his face with the back of his hand. His dad doesn’t look upset, only smiles at the reaction. He stretches out a hand toward his son, fingers spread, palm open, angled slightly down as if he could as well take the hand of someone much smaller than Fred is today, forty-two and healthy, standing as an adult before him on the green grass of his childhood lawn.

“C’mere Freddie,” urges his father, but Fred doesn’t need encouragement. That’s his daddy, goddamn it, and nothing and no one can tell him not to go in that house.

He moves forward on shaking legs and sees light pouring out of the doorway around his father’s form, his father still smiling benevolently at him, eyes bright with loving. The summer evening seems to melt, the sounds and smells of it dimming the closer he gets to his father, and yet everything else is so much brighter - he’s so close now and he can feel a flooding warm coming from him, from the open porch light. He’s so close to the end. He’s so close to being safe.

He looks sideways just for a moment as he’s climbing the steps, his head turning almost of it’s own accord to take one last look at the kids playing catch, and he sees that it really has melted: the blue sky become an endless, blinding white that he couldn’t have picked a jet trail out of if he tried. The kids are still playing, their ball connecting with their gloves soundlessly now, their clean faces turned only to each other, unaware that the sky has disappeared.

The taller of the two sends an easy, silent toss to the shorter one, who catches it neatly, peacefully. It’s time for Fred to turn his head back now, go forward into the house, but something keeps him from looking away. For the second time that evening, the air goes perfectly still in his lungs, his foot freezing half-up on the top step of the porch. He feels a coldness settle in him, a coldness that doesn’t belong here, one that runs like ice through his veins and stills his breathing completely.  

 _“Dad-”_ he tries to say. _“I-”_

He becomes suddenly aware of a total absence of sound, and realizes that the cicadas have suddenly disappeared. The music plays on, but Fred doesn’t turn his head to see what’s become of the radio. He can’t. He’s frozen staring at the little boy with the glove, the way the light from the non-sky strikes perfectly off his red hair.

_The way the light from the non-sky strikes perfectly off his red hair._

He looks and looks and looks at the child, transfixed, his mouth slightly open, his body as still on the stairs as if he had been carved there from stone. His mind has gone curiously, perfectly blank: he pushes hard against it, tries to break through to some kind of understanding, and fails. He only looks at the child and feels a throbbing absence in him, something he _should_ remember, _needs_ to remember, but can’t.

He realizes that the redhead’s playmate has evaporated into thin air, that the ball they’d been catching with has likewise ceased to exist. Further on up the road, the kids with the ice cream are gone too: he no longer hears the roll of tires or the far-off rubber ball slapping of children at play. All that’s left is the two of them - himself and this piece of the landscape that he doesn’t recognize, but who reminds him of _something_ so achingly that he can’t stop looking at him, not even to look back into his father’s eyes. There’s no early-evening sun anymore, but the glow of what had been remains in a halo around the boy’s hair, setting the orange of it on fire.

The orange of it.

The absence of the cicadas has become deafening. Fred looks frantically around him, but even the pinwheels have stopped spinning, as if it had all been an illusion for his benefit, and now was gone. Terrified, he looks back at the doorway, half expecting his father to have vanished too, but he’s still there, smiling the same comforting smile, holding out his hand.  

“I-” Fred manages, but can’t talk. He casts a frightened, petrified glance back at the child, who looks plainly back at him without interest or suspicion. He doesn’t know him. He doesn’t know him, and yet he _does_ somehow, knows someone like him, knows something so big and so important that he can’t grasp it - a rotted abscess of memory trying and failing to assert itself in his mind.

He takes a half step back off the porch.

Without moving his eyes from the little boy with red hair, Fred steps back again, keeps backing up down the driveway, or where the driveway used to be. Something is settling in his gut, a memory more real than any of this clicking securely into place in his mind. The trees that had shaded the lane are melting into the brightness, the ground feeling less and less solid under his feet.

“Fred?” asks his dad, still silhouetted in the warm yellow of the open door, the only solid thing in the landscape now. Fred tears his eyes away from him. At the base of the driveway, the road stretches out in an infinite void of white, the sky above them throbbing with the brightest light he’s ever seen, one that threatens to block out everything, one that calls to him like a lover.

“NO!” he screams, screams before he even realizes he’s doing it, screams because the white is filling his head now, because the little boy playing catch at the end of his street had had red hair and now he knows why it matters. He grabs fistfuls of his own hair and yanks, trying to force himself back into his senses, trying to keep the rest of it at bay. “ _NO_!”

He runs. He runs as if he can outrun the light, even as the neighbourhood is melting around him, eyes screwed shut against it, hands clasped over his ears. He runs and runs through the blurring whiteness until he trips and falls on his hands and knees, a move that would have skinned them raw if he had had anything left to fall on.

“NO,” he yells, screwing his eyes tighter shut, though the white remains as constant as ever on the inside of his eyelids, building in pressure like a tidal wave as what used to be gravel bites into the soft flesh of his palms. “NO, I SAID NO!”

He tries and fails to get up, panting with exertion, but only succeeds in falling back down. “ENOUGH-!” he screams, striking his palm against the thing that wasn't quite pavement anymore- “LET ME GO! LET ME GO BACK!”

He tears at the pavement with fingers curled into bloody claws, tearing like he's trying to dig himself out, howling all the while. The music is screaming in his ears, the white rising around him like a fog.  
  
“LET ME GO BACK! DO YOU HEAR ME? I WANT TO GO -


	12. Overtime

_Back_.

He wakes up in a room with a bright light that smells strongly of antiseptic, and there’s people bending over him, their faces half-hidden by blue latex masks that blur in his vision into a colourful smear. There’s music playing from a far-away corner: not the pure, clear sound of the place he had left, but the slightly crappy quality of a cheap battery-operated radio. Even turned down low, the sound throbs painfully in his head.

_Here I am, rock you like a hurricane_

_(are you ready, baby?)_

The people in masks are all in a panic, fluttering around above him in a rush of activity that makes his head hurt to try and follow. He’s probably not supposed to be awake yet. They’d run into this problem with the appendectomy too, a long time ago: the anaesthesia just wasn’t quite enough to hold him all the way to recovery.

 _Don’t worry_ , Fred tries to tell them, _I’ve done this before_ , _(they were cutting me open_ , he realizes simultaneously with a wry kind of amusement, _they were cutting me open listening to the fucking Scorpions, )_ but his mouth is too dry to speak, and something stuck in his windpipe is keeping him from talking. " _Archie,”_ he manages instead, rasps it out around the tube in his throat, savouring the syllables - his favourite syllables in all the world - even as sudden fear for his son grips him like cold water.

The people in masks look at one another. One of them speaks up. “Is that his kid-?”

So the legend’s made it back here already: the one where he takes a bullet for his offspring like a hero. _You would have done it too_ , he tries to tell them, (by telepathy, because he’s too weak to manufacture any more sound out of his collapsed throat.) _If it was your boy you would have done it, and you wouldn’t think anything special of it. You’d just do it the way you didn’t drop him as a kid, when he was born._

“Your son’s safe,” says the other one, the one with the more authoritative voice. Fred feels the painful throb of a new needle in his arm, sees an oxygen mask hovering, waiting to bring the darkness back. “He’s safe. Don’t worry.”

Fred’s lips twitch slightly, his mouth stretching painfully into the most genuine grin he’s managed in the past four months. His respiration rattles out around the tube when he breathes in to speak, and the doctor leans unwittingly closer to him, affording him the attention of a hero even as he should really be putting him back under.

“Safe..” Fred manages through parched lips, breath grating, his teeth sinking cruelly into the bloody flesh of his tongue when he closes his mouth between words. “..on... _second_.”

The doctor doesn’t get it, looks at him like he’s bonkers, and that’s okay. It’s his own little in-joke: one he shares with the universe. A universe that had made the wrong call this morning.

 _God,_ he thinks, _if you’re out there, you’re not much of an umpire._

They have the mask back over his face, and he feels the sting of yet another needle in his skin. The doctor who had asked if Archie was his kid presses his hand and says something that’s probably meant to be comforting, but Fred doesn’t need to hear it. He knows that they’re safe.  
  
_Safe on second_ , thinks Fred one last time, and lets himself fall back into the black.

**Author's Note:**

> Fred's born 1975 and his sisters are: 
> 
> Debbie, b. 1963  
> Pamela, b. 1964  
> Susan, b. 1966  
> Linda, b. 1969


End file.
